Ioannis Martinos, the Greek shipowner who branched out from his family’s Thenamaris group to develop an online chartering platform, Signal Ocean, is launching the service in Singapore this week in a bid to break into Asia.

The platform, which is already used by operators responsible for 50% of big tanker spot fixtures, according to Martinos, extracts information from fixture reports and tonnage-list emails, and combines it with publicly available data to provide a single commercial view of the market.